Barcelona

Bus to plane to train and now I’m back in Barcelona. My fifth time here in six years; it now kind of feels like a home away from home.

As for Portugal, I don’t know. It’s a very poor country, with one of the lowest per capita income rates in the EU. If you remove countries in serious trouble like Greece and Romania, Portugal is at the bottom. I spoke to two different people who have PhDs and are working in the tourist industry for minimum wage (about 600 Euros a month), which is roughly what a half-decent apartment costs.

Sardines and cork were historically part of the Portuguese identity. Sardines have been overfished and are now being commercially raised in fish farms, so when you order them in a Portuguese restaurant and have a romantic image of a local fisherman delivering his catch to the restaurant, well, probably not. The cork business took a major hit ten years ago when many wine producers moved to screw tops, although I’ve read that it’s making a return.

That leaves tourism, which is a huge driver of the Portuguese economy. Because of this, any area of the country that has any tourism potential is milked for every last dollar of hospitality-industry revenue possible. Almost every town I rode through or stayed at in the Algarve was overrun with tourists (which wasn’t the case when I rode along Spain’s Atlantic coast last year). Anecdotally, some friends of ours went to Porto last year and all they told us was that it was “too touristy” for their taste. Several people who live here did recommend some areas of Portugal that they thought would be great to visit and are still pretty unspoiled.

But hey, I got to bike the entire Portuguese coast from one end to the other, the weather was beautiful, I swam in the ocean and didn’t get run over by a bus, so . . . two thumbs up from me.

Goodbye to . . .

The cigarette machines, a quaint reminder of our past. On a related note, Portugal is also “open carry” (alcohol, not guns), so it also took a little getting used to seeing people walking around in the evening double fisting beers or mixed drinks.

The pictures of creepy sentient strawberries with teeth who enjoy hopping into a blender. Smoothie anyone?























These signs, which according to Google Translate mean “Bags for the coconuts from your dog.”










And the polite well-dressed young men all over Lisbon asking me in perfect English if I wanted to buy any weed or hash. No thank you.

And finally, some advice I got from someone here about eating at restaurants abroad - don't eat at any restaurant that has pictures of the food on the menu, that has someone standing on the sidewalk asking people to come in, or serves tapas if it's not in Spain.